10 ms·

Hello, I'm Vivek, founder/CEO of HackerRank. Our intention with this initiative is to takedown plagiarized code snippets or solutions to company assessments. Th

by rvivek 4y ago

Hello, I'm Vivek, founder/CEO of HackerRank. Our intention with this initiative is to takedown plagiarized code snippets or solutions to company assessments. This was definitely an unintended consequence. We are looking into it ASAP and also going to do an RCA to ensure this doesn't happen again. Sorry, everyone! EDIT: update here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092085

anotherhue 4y ago
RECOMPENSE
endisneigh 4y ago
I’m curious - why even bother? What will you do if someone torrents the solutions? Focus on figuring out another solution. Leetcode for instance puts the solutions out there.
- rvivek 4y ago
  It's not an either or. We need to do the takedown AND figure out a way where we can do things like randomizing questions but preserving the integrity of it to ensure a fair evaluation, etc.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    Why do the takedown though? You’ll never get rid of solutions being online. There are solutions to most questions on leetcode on GitHub as we speak. I don’t get it. If your assessment is designed that knowing the solution ruins it then your assessing process is broken. I’ve literally showed candidates the solution to leetcode questions and they still don’t get it. Trying to remove solutions seems like a poor use of effort imho.
  - xucheng 4y ago
    > figure out a way where we can do things like randomizing questions but preserving the integrity of it to ensure a fair evaluation, etc How does any of these have anything to do with copyright infringement in the context of DMCA takedown? Do you even own the copyright to the alleged leaked solution?
  - electroly 4y ago
    Is your company's legal position seriously that you hold copyright on independently written solutions to your prompts? If so, I'd love to see you sued for this. This issue goes way beyond just one misfire.
    - not2b 4y ago
      Exactly. When you file a DMCA takedown notice you are asserting under penalty of perjury that you own the copyright. While few have suffered consequences for false notices, pissing enough people off might change that.
  - asjfkdlf 4y ago
    This is a horrible abuse of the DMCA. HackerRank does not own the copyright to independent solutions.
  - philderbeast 4y ago
    No, no you dont need to do take downs, ever. literaly everything your assessing is programming 101. its not something that you can or should be asserting any copywrite on. infact I would challange you to register the copywrites on your questions/answers and see exactly how far you get with that process before you even consider sending a single DMCA notice.
  - b20000 4y ago
    no, you need to find a better business idea
  - psyc 4y ago
    > we need to do the takedown You’ve made a serious mistake somewhere in your reasoning. What you believe is the property of your relatively insignificant enterprise, the whole rest of the world knows damn well is not your property. Besides, this is small potatoes. Why don’t you copyright Wikipedia, then DMCA WikiMedia, then put your copy behind a paywall.
  - math-dev 4y ago
    For content you copied to begin with????
black_13 4y ago
travisoliphant 4y ago
Thanks for showing up here and replying. I can understand the net being cast too wide for a real problem you are trying to solve. It does have real consequences for already under-resourced communities, though. I appreciate the "fix-it-twice" attitude implied by the RCA promise (Root Cause Analysis for those who also had to look it up). Also, consider recognition and restitution for the unnecessary work you created for the NumFOCUS director, a NumFOCUS lawyer, and the SymPy maintainers. A $25k donation to NumFOCUS would be a good start. If you are willing to talk about what happened publicly, I'm starting a podcast/video series to discuss business and open-source. This would make an interesting conversation. Perhaps we can turn this into a positive to raise awareness and inspire better behavior in the industry? Ping me.
- haltingproblem 4y ago
  - bfz 4y ago
    Travis is the creator of NumPy.
    - haltingproblem 4y ago
      I know and so what? edit: what triggered me is that he is here promoting his podcast!!??!!? seriously, a little EQ will go a long way.
      - travisoliphant 4y ago
        I'm sorry about triggering you. I can see your point. I did not mean to focus attention away from what happened and how to avoid it. I am sincerely interested in seeing if the HackerRank leadership will reach out and discuss. I was not intending to promote anything I'm doing right now. I suspect they won't but I will talk to them respectfully if they do. Let's promote the SymPy maintainers, though. Let's also promote NumFOCUS, because they do a valuable service to community-driven projects and could help SymPy respond to this sensibly. Let's also promote NumFOCUS because they efficiently and tirelessly work to help the projects they fiscally sponsor (like SymPy) -- providing legal support: https://numfocus.org/ https://numfocus.org/. Perhaps something good can come out of this, still.
tomxor 4y ago
Possible solutions to affect some justice and reclaim your image: 1. Fire WorthIT Solutions (no RCA necessary, do not automate or outsource DMCA, even if it's human based automation) 2. Apologise to SymPy 3. Discuss internally the cost-vs-benefit (more than monetary) of embarking on copyright policing as part of your company's future strategy 4. Blog results of #3 WRT #3, sustainability comes to mind - if dissemination of solutions is a serious threat to your current business model/implementation (something you might want to validate anyway) then consider adapting to mitigate it to the point of irrelevance. Perhaps you are already doing this, but DMCA policing is at best a distraction and at worst a PR nightmare and menace to FOSS like today, it also doesn't scale well.
- rvivek 4y ago
  Good distillation. Will follow-up with a blog post on this.
- kristianov 4y ago
  0. Dissolve HackerRank. All things considered, this company has done net negative impact to tech industry.
  - johnsillings 4y ago
    Why?
    - ep103 4y ago
      Because it is a horrifically flawed metric by which to hire engineers, and is teaching upcoming crops of engineers valueless skills to enter the industry
      - Jcowell 4y ago
        I disagree. Kind of. There are many questions that are bullshit puzzle types but I do think HR and LC provides value of teaching when a Data Structure or algorithm is suitable for use. At the very least, It’s far better means of understanding the flexible use that college textbooks don’t teach while having test cases to see pitfalls of implementations. Having a community that shows ingenious ways of tackling problems is valuable too.
A1kmm 4y ago
To ensure that they aren't liable to HackerRank for any infringing content, GitHub has to keep content down for at least 10 days after receiving a counter notification. Do you plan to contact GitHub and give them a legally binding agreement to indemnify them for any infringement of HackerRank's copyright in the material they took down (I'm sure there is no such infringement, but by agreeing you won't sue GitHub for restoring the content, you effectively retract the notice and give them no reason to wait the 10 days)? I think a sincere apology should include steps to urgently minimise the ongoing damage to the existing victims, not just analyse what went wrong to prevent hurting other victims.
- not2b 4y ago
  Unless in that time the people who filed the notice withdraw it and acknowledge the error. Then GitHub can immediately restore it.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
faddypaddy34 4y ago
No you aren't. You are only sorry this made it to the front page of HN. Revoke the contract and stop with DMCA takedowns. Unless your company has invented brand new ways of solving common algorithms everything you are doing is most likely derivative work anyway.
- crossroadsguy 4y ago
  This company hires fresh college graduates to regurgitate famous algo problems in different wordings and slight variations and then claim copyright. Just look at their problems. Also they take pictures and videos of candidates while taking interviews. Without that permission they don’t allow the test. They’re not part of the problem - they’re the problem.
gfd 4y ago
You can't copyright algorithmic code snippets. It's like trying to copyright math. You will have an insane amount of false positive from every repository that have ever implemented a prefix sum or binary search. (Or anything autocompleted using github copilot or alphacode which I believe is trained on competitive programming styled submissions from codeforces and atcoder) The solution would be to build some sort of cheat detector and punish only the candidate. Don't take down and lose the goodwill of the entire programming community by abusing draconian laws.
- SeanLuke 4y ago
  > You can't copyright algorithmic code snippets. It's like trying to copyright math. You might first investigate just how small the piece of code was on which nearly all of Oracle's case vs. Google rested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722514
  - jolux 4y ago
    This is a misunderstanding of the case, as rayiner’s comment in that thread attests. That code was not the only code that was copied, there were also tens of thousands of lines of interface code that were the same. The case rested on whether the interface code was copyrightable. Oracle used that smaller sample as evidence that Google had copied carelessly from copyrighted material.
- rvivek 4y ago
  I'm sorry. I should have clarified and I can't edit my original comment now. I meant plagiarized problem statements. Usually these sites have the entire problem statements from our website along with the solution (aka code snippets to solve.)
  - philderbeast 4y ago
    Most, if not all, of the problem statements won't even qualify for copywrite, they are generic problems that people have been stating for decades or more and as such are extreamly unlikly to be unique or original to hackerrank. I am sure however you have already assesed this and applied for the appropriate registration for these works that you are claiming to own the copywrite to? right?
mjg59 4y ago
> solutions to company assessments Sorry, are you asserting that you hold copyright over solutions that other people write?
- jakebasile 4y ago
  Yeah this stood out to me too. If I publish code that I wrote for no remuneration, how does HackerRank claim to own the copyright to that code?
  - briandear 4y ago
    They explicitly don’t. See this: https://www.hackerrank.com/terms-of-service https://www.hackerrank.com/terms-of-service
- perihelions 4y ago
  It would actually probably count as a derivative work under US copyright law. (Don't misread me: I do not endorse, condone, or make excuses for US copyright law. I'm just describing it). edit: Here's an example, - "In so doing, the magistrate judge agreed with plaintiffs’ assertion that the solution manuals sold by defendant qualified as “derivative works” under the Copyright Act. As in Pavlica v. Behr and Addison-Wesley Publ’g Co. v. Brown, defendant’s manuals complemented plaintiffs’ 187 copyrighted textbooks, had no “independent economic value” and were “meaningless’ without the textbooks because they merely provided answers to questions posed in the textbooks." https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/almID/1202435027834/ https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/almID/1202435027834/ (2009) https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4345754/pearson-education-inc-v-henry-nugroho/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4345754/pearson-educati... (the ruling is available here, gratis)
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    IANAL but I believe the case is different for algorithmic solutions. The solutions to a particular textbook are entirely useless outside the context of the textbook, but the solution to "efficiently find a substring within a string" is useful in day-to-day programming. The takedown isn't aimed at the result of "convert 700m to feet", but "describe the process of converting between metres and feet", which is plain ridiculous.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> This was definitely an unintended consequence. A person driving 100 miles per hour down a residential street and crashing into something is an unintended consequence, but not unforeseen. This may have been "unintended" but when you have a company file DMCA notices on your behalf without proper supervision (especially when they had filed DMCA notices like this against other open source libraries) it is not "unforeseen" for them to file a DMCA notice against a completely innocent project. At the very minimum the open source library that was affected and their maintainers deserve monetary recompense for the time and stress that your actions have cost them.
jeroenhd 4y ago
Are you seriously claiming copyright over other people's solutions? You have *no* right, legally or ethically, to exercise any kind of control over "solutions to company assessments" under the DMCA. At worst, you can try to exercise the controls in the EULA that your victims agreed to, but this sounds like abuse of the legal system.
- MarkMarine 4y ago
  But it's working. Here is a DCMA the author tried to fight, saying hacker rank doesn't publish their solutions, and the solution is the sole work of the author: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/ea3736a0c4c9574e0c8cea06db41cc4ee01c7e83/2021/11/2021-11-30-hackerrank-counternotice.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/ea3736a0c4c9574e0c8cea06... guess what, it's still offline for DCMA.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    The problem with the DMCA is that if the claimant disagrees with your counter notice, the content stays offline for at least enough time for a lawsuit be be filed over the contents of the post, if the claimant is actually willing to take the matter to court. I don't think anyone will actually go through the expenses to go to court over a code snippet on Github, unless they're particularly principled, wealthy, and retired and I think Hackerrank will definitely try to send their in their legal team. By just filing a counter notice, you're also doxing yourself to people who clearly have no interest in following the law. Github seems to have processed the DMCA counter notice but the content is still offline. From that I gather that Hackerrank filed a lawsuit or the counter notice was retracted somehow, or Github is violating the DMCA by keeping the content offline.
    - josephcsible 4y ago
      Yeah, the fact that the DMCA works like that makes it a guilty-until-proven-innocent system.
      - MarkMarine 4y ago
briandear 4y ago
> is to takedown plagiarized code snippets or solutions to company assessments So which is it? Plagiarized or solutions? Because unless your company actually owns the copyright for the code in question, you have no right to it. If a Google assessment asks “how many manhole covers are there in New York” and someone decides to create a repo with “Manhole covers in New York: 23,000” there is no copyright claim. Do HackerRank users affirmatively sign a non-disclosure agreement? I checked your terms and there is not an apparent non-disclosure agreement. If not, there isn’t any legal recourse if users decide to talk about or solve your problems off the platform. Educational and not for profit use is often protected by Fair Use. I didn’t see the repo in question so I can’t comment on if the use of the material meets the Fair Use criteria. However if people are sharing their answers to your questions in a repo, especially for educational or non-profit value, there isn’t much you can legally do about it. For example, If I take the GMAT and I discuss a question on Twitter, that’s allowed by Fair Use. If I offer to sell a PDF of the entire test, that would not be protected. If someone said “hey HackerRank’s Ruby test asked a question about finding the smallest value in an array” and then they posted a solution. That’s absolutely not violating a HackerRack copyright. People even have the right to describe their experience on HackerRank in great detail. From your own policy: “Content that You own and post on or through HackerRank belongs to You..” So if someone wants to post their solution to a question, your own terms allow that. It’s their solution, it belongs to the user.[1] If someone else “plagiarizes” another user’s solution, HR doesn’t have standing for a DMCA takedown. The user that created the content does, but not HR. However even if HackerRank did own the solutions, there is a high likelihood that Fair Use would be in effect. I have a strong dislike of HackerRank type companies because it’s pretty rare that those ridiculously academic assessments predict real world performance. They are a screening tool for the lazy. A well designed, relevant code test relating to the work of the company or a solid technical interview is much more valuable in my experience. When I was interviewing with companies, I immediately passed on the job of HackerRank was part of the hiring process. I ended up at a FAANG for over 5 years, so it’s pretty clear that anti-HackerRank bias among potential employees like me have a detrimental effect on recruiting. [1] https://www.hackerrank.com/terms-of-service https://www.hackerrank.com/terms-of-service
- MarkMarine 4y ago
paranoidrobot 4y ago
> plagiarized code snippets I'm looking at the page that was taken down[1] and it seems to be largely full of pretty basic code snippets demonstrating how to use the Solvers module. Your DMCA request[2] includes the statements that say, in part, that Fair Use has been considered, that you own the copyright, and that the information in that statement is true and accurate. Could you elaborate what on that page you consider to be your copyrighted content, and how you came to hold that copyright? Is it the code snippets, as per your comment? Did your company have an employee write that content? When the DMCA takedown request was being drafted, did someone consider whether those snippets are even qualifies as an Original Work? I'm getting at whether they contain even a minimal level of creativity, as the US Supreme Court has said is a requirement for copyright[3]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220114132753/https://docs.sympy.org/latest/modules/solvers/solvers.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220114132753/https://docs.symp... [2] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2022/04/2022-04-15-hackerrank.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2022/04/2022-04-1... [3] https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/ https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- RachelF 4y ago
  I wonder how many of the HackerRank questions are themselves plagiarized from other places?
  - kristianov 4y ago
    They started by stealing and now these thieves want to claim all code.
  - epolanski 4y ago
    Exactly, I have been sent on HackerRank by potential employers twice and every time I was given the usual coding challenge I had already seen on leetcode or similar.
0x0000000 4y ago
> Our intention with this initiative is to takedown plagiarized code snippets or solutions to company assessments. Oooh boy I can't wait to begin publishing solutions to your company's assessments.
oscarbenjamin 4y ago
Thanks Vivek for responding. Speaking as one of the maintainers of SymPy (who received the DCMA takedown request by email) I would like to note some points: 1. If you do a web search for "HackerRank DMCA" you will find similar examples of this that have happened in the past (with exactly the same text). 2. The text of the request is not in any way designed to enable a reasonable response. No detail is given about what the infringing content is so there is no way to comply. 3. It is also clear from this and previous cases that whatever process is used to identify potential targets for DMCA yields false positives and no reasonable judgement seems to be applied in whether or not to issue a takedown request. I also think that GitHub's processes are faulty here: 1. We were given one business day to reply. I replied within 2hrs to say that the request was obviously spam and then sought legal advice. The repo (and website) were shut down before we could get legal advice. One day is nowhere near enough time. The request came in on Thursday night (UK time) and in the UK both Friday and Monday are public holidays this weekend. I don't even know what one "business day" means in this situation. 2. GitHub gives some guidance for how to submit a counter claim but none of the information is applicable to a case like this where so little information is given that is simultaneously impossible to comply with the request and impossible to dispute it. If GitHub makes it this easy to spam DMCA requests then they should also provide some guidance for how to deal with spam requests. I wonder if the FSF or someone else can come up with a good template response to DMCA requests that just don't have enough information in them. If the request doesn't even explain how you could comply then it should be possible to respond to that in a blanket fashion.
- rvivek 4y ago
  Oscar, thank you for responding and I'm terribly sorry for the disruption this has caused. I should have taken this more seriously when it sprung up on HN the first time but for whatever reason we just fixed that problem and moved on. This is a serious one and we are working on a strategy that is sustainable. Meanwhile, if we need to make a monetary contribution for your effort or anything more we could do to promote, what would be the best way to do it? If you'd like to send me an email to discuss further, I'm available at vivek at hackerrank Thank you & sorry!
  - 4y ago
haltingproblem 4y ago
I hate you and your company and will make every effort to not support anyone who uses it in any form whats over. How can you shitbags take down SymPy and then show up on HN to actually make light of it with your crapola comments while it remains taken down.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
certik 4y ago
Dear Vivek, thank you for the note. I am the original author of SymPy. Most people who work on SymPy myself included do it in our free time. So far this has cost many hours of my and many other people's free time to try to figure out what is going on and to get this resolved. I also personally reject your allegations against us. I thought about this situation and how your company could make this right. If you would be willing to help improve the SymPy project, I think it would be very well received. If you are interested, please let us know! See Travis Oliphant's reply, you could for example donate some money to NumFOCUS. We are very good with using money that people or companies donate to fund development and we can really boost SymPy forward big time with a generous donation.
- rvivek 4y ago
  Yes, absolutely. Apologies for the disruption we caused. We are going to make a donation and here are the changes we are making https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092085
paulproteus 4y ago
I hope you can go beyond root cause analysis and publish some kind of cost-benefit analysis. The risks from misrepresenting your copyright in these cases are not small. Diebold Election Systems paid $125,000 in a similar situation: https://www.eff.org/cases/online-policy-group-v-diebold https://www.eff.org/cases/online-policy-group-v-diebold
_jal 4y ago
Allow me to strongly suggest you stop DCMAing things without a human-with-a-clue in the loop before firing. I get it, I'm an automate-first type of person, too. But it appears your outfit has made a habit of doing this, and you're messing with innocent people for no good reason. Doing that in a `for` loop is irresponsible as hell, and frankly you deserve the bad press you're getting. I highly recommend you reconsider. Legacy media companies do this kind of thing, too. I hope you're more interested in your reputation than they are.
danamit 4y ago
Can companies of guys like this one be penalized for sending automated DMCA requests?
Jupe 4y ago
Wait. Wait a minute. Just wait one little minute here... Your company has issued a DMCA takedown notice for "plagiarized code snippets" against the library-in-questions own documentation? (The take down was issued against docs.sympy.org; linked directly within sympy's GIT repo README.md: https://github.com/sympy/sympy https://github.com/sympy/sympy) And this is an "initiative" your organization has undertaken? Have you thought this through? Where should engineers who want to learn about sympy go to attain that knowledge? Where did your team learn about and generate the assessment questions? Where do you stop with this initiative? Would you issue takedown notices to MDN? Stack Overflow? What about VSCode Copilot?
vmception 4y ago
"Design an automated DMCA takedown algorithm in 40 minutes"
- leaflets2 4y ago
  For ch: char in solution.text: If webpage.html.indexOf(ch) >= 0 then DMCAReq.send() End End
b20000 4y ago
I hope that all of your snippets and solutions are continued to be spread as coding interviews need to disappear and are the ultimate evil our industry has been dealing with now for several years. Besides, it's not your property anyway, it's the property of those taking the coding interviews.
epolanski 4y ago
> Our intention with this initiative is to takedown plagiarized code snippets or solutions to company assessments. How can this be legal? Plagiarized is moreover a very conveniently vague word. By this very vague definition the overwhelming majority of your own content has been seen on various parts of the internet way before you ever started your business. There can't be a copyright on such a thing and I hope someone fights you in court, this is nothing short of bullying.
skeletal88 4y ago
Will you just stop with the DMCA bs, where you threaten random websites that talk about generic programming? Your company does not own the basic algorithms that are the solutions to the tests on HackerRank.

by rvivek 4y ago

anotherhue 4y ago

RECOMPENSE

endisneigh 4y ago

I’m curious - why even bother? What will you do if someone torrents the solutions? Focus on figuring out another solution. Leetcode for instance puts the solutions out there.

rvivek 4y ago
It's not an either or. We need to do the takedown AND figure out a way where we can do things like randomizing questions but preserving the integrity of it to ensure a fair evaluation, etc.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Why do the takedown though? You’ll never get rid of solutions being online. There are solutions to most questions on leetcode on GitHub as we speak. I don’t get it. If your assessment is designed that knowing the solution ruins it then your assessing process is broken. I’ve literally showed candidates the solution to leetcode questions and they still don’t get it. Trying to remove solutions seems like a poor use of effort imho.
- xucheng 4y ago
  > figure out a way where we can do things like randomizing questions but preserving the integrity of it to ensure a fair evaluation, etc How does any of these have anything to do with copyright infringement in the context of DMCA takedown? Do you even own the copyright to the alleged leaked solution?
- electroly 4y ago
  Is your company's legal position seriously that you hold copyright on independently written solutions to your prompts? If so, I'd love to see you sued for this. This issue goes way beyond just one misfire.
  - not2b 4y ago
    Exactly. When you file a DMCA takedown notice you are asserting under penalty of perjury that you own the copyright. While few have suffered consequences for false notices, pissing enough people off might change that.
- asjfkdlf 4y ago
  This is a horrible abuse of the DMCA. HackerRank does not own the copyright to independent solutions.
- philderbeast 4y ago
  No, no you dont need to do take downs, ever. literaly everything your assessing is programming 101. its not something that you can or should be asserting any copywrite on. infact I would challange you to register the copywrites on your questions/answers and see exactly how far you get with that process before you even consider sending a single DMCA notice.
- b20000 4y ago
  no, you need to find a better business idea
- psyc 4y ago
  > we need to do the takedown You’ve made a serious mistake somewhere in your reasoning. What you believe is the property of your relatively insignificant enterprise, the whole rest of the world knows damn well is not your property. Besides, this is small potatoes. Why don’t you copyright Wikipedia, then DMCA WikiMedia, then put your copy behind a paywall.
- math-dev 4y ago
  For content you copied to begin with????

black_13 4y ago

travisoliphant 4y ago

Thanks for showing up here and replying. I can understand the net being cast too wide for a real problem you are trying to solve. It does have real consequences for already under-resourced communities, though. I appreciate the "fix-it-twice" attitude implied by the RCA promise (Root Cause Analysis for those who also had to look it up). Also, consider recognition and restitution for the unnecessary work you created for the NumFOCUS director, a NumFOCUS lawyer, and the SymPy maintainers. A $25k donation to NumFOCUS would be a good start. If you are willing to talk about what happened publicly, I'm starting a podcast/video series to discuss business and open-source. This would make an interesting conversation. Perhaps we can turn this into a positive to raise awareness and inspire better behavior in the industry? Ping me.

haltingproblem 4y ago
- bfz 4y ago
  Travis is the creator of NumPy.
  - haltingproblem 4y ago
    I know and so what? edit: what triggered me is that he is here promoting his podcast!!??!!? seriously, a little EQ will go a long way.
    - travisoliphant 4y ago
      I'm sorry about triggering you. I can see your point. I did not mean to focus attention away from what happened and how to avoid it. I am sincerely interested in seeing if the HackerRank leadership will reach out and discuss. I was not intending to promote anything I'm doing right now. I suspect they won't but I will talk to them respectfully if they do. Let's promote the SymPy maintainers, though. Let's also promote NumFOCUS, because they do a valuable service to community-driven projects and could help SymPy respond to this sensibly. Let's also promote NumFOCUS because they efficiently and tirelessly work to help the projects they fiscally sponsor (like SymPy) -- providing legal support: https://numfocus.org/ https://numfocus.org/. Perhaps something good can come out of this, still.

tomxor 4y ago

Possible solutions to affect some justice and reclaim your image: 1. Fire WorthIT Solutions (no RCA necessary, do not automate or outsource DMCA, even if it's human based automation) 2. Apologise to SymPy 3. Discuss internally the cost-vs-benefit (more than monetary) of embarking on copyright policing as part of your company's future strategy 4. Blog results of #3 WRT #3, sustainability comes to mind - if dissemination of solutions is a serious threat to your current business model/implementation (something you might want to validate anyway) then consider adapting to mitigate it to the point of irrelevance. Perhaps you are already doing this, but DMCA policing is at best a distraction and at worst a PR nightmare and menace to FOSS like today, it also doesn't scale well.

rvivek 4y ago
Good distillation. Will follow-up with a blog post on this.
kristianov 4y ago
0. Dissolve HackerRank. All things considered, this company has done net negative impact to tech industry.
- johnsillings 4y ago
  Why?
  - ep103 4y ago
    Because it is a horrifically flawed metric by which to hire engineers, and is teaching upcoming crops of engineers valueless skills to enter the industry
    - Jcowell 4y ago
      I disagree. Kind of. There are many questions that are bullshit puzzle types but I do think HR and LC provides value of teaching when a Data Structure or algorithm is suitable for use. At the very least, It’s far better means of understanding the flexible use that college textbooks don’t teach while having test cases to see pitfalls of implementations. Having a community that shows ingenious ways of tackling problems is valuable too.

A1kmm 4y ago

To ensure that they aren't liable to HackerRank for any infringing content, GitHub has to keep content down for at least 10 days after receiving a counter notification. Do you plan to contact GitHub and give them a legally binding agreement to indemnify them for any infringement of HackerRank's copyright in the material they took down (I'm sure there is no such infringement, but by agreeing you won't sue GitHub for restoring the content, you effectively retract the notice and give them no reason to wait the 10 days)? I think a sincere apology should include steps to urgently minimise the ongoing damage to the existing victims, not just analyse what went wrong to prevent hurting other victims.

not2b 4y ago
Unless in that time the people who filed the notice withdraw it and acknowledge the error. Then GitHub can immediately restore it.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

faddypaddy34 4y ago

No you aren't. You are only sorry this made it to the front page of HN. Revoke the contract and stop with DMCA takedowns. Unless your company has invented brand new ways of solving common algorithms everything you are doing is most likely derivative work anyway.

crossroadsguy 4y ago
This company hires fresh college graduates to regurgitate famous algo problems in different wordings and slight variations and then claim copyright. Just look at their problems. Also they take pictures and videos of candidates while taking interviews. Without that permission they don’t allow the test. They’re not part of the problem - they’re the problem.

gfd 4y ago

You can't copyright algorithmic code snippets. It's like trying to copyright math. You will have an insane amount of false positive from every repository that have ever implemented a prefix sum or binary search. (Or anything autocompleted using github copilot or alphacode which I believe is trained on competitive programming styled submissions from codeforces and atcoder) The solution would be to build some sort of cheat detector and punish only the candidate. Don't take down and lose the goodwill of the entire programming community by abusing draconian laws.

SeanLuke 4y ago
> You can't copyright algorithmic code snippets. It's like trying to copyright math. You might first investigate just how small the piece of code was on which nearly all of Oracle's case vs. Google rested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11722514
- jolux 4y ago
  This is a misunderstanding of the case, as rayiner’s comment in that thread attests. That code was not the only code that was copied, there were also tens of thousands of lines of interface code that were the same. The case rested on whether the interface code was copyrightable. Oracle used that smaller sample as evidence that Google had copied carelessly from copyrighted material.
rvivek 4y ago
I'm sorry. I should have clarified and I can't edit my original comment now. I meant plagiarized problem statements. Usually these sites have the entire problem statements from our website along with the solution (aka code snippets to solve.)
- philderbeast 4y ago
  Most, if not all, of the problem statements won't even qualify for copywrite, they are generic problems that people have been stating for decades or more and as such are extreamly unlikly to be unique or original to hackerrank. I am sure however you have already assesed this and applied for the appropriate registration for these works that you are claiming to own the copywrite to? right?

mjg59 4y ago

> solutions to company assessments Sorry, are you asserting that you hold copyright over solutions that other people write?

jakebasile 4y ago
Yeah this stood out to me too. If I publish code that I wrote for no remuneration, how does HackerRank claim to own the copyright to that code?
- briandear 4y ago
  They explicitly don’t. See this: https://www.hackerrank.com/terms-of-service https://www.hackerrank.com/terms-of-service
perihelions 4y ago
It would actually probably count as a derivative work under US copyright law. (Don't misread me: I do not endorse, condone, or make excuses for US copyright law. I'm just describing it). edit: Here's an example, - "In so doing, the magistrate judge agreed with plaintiffs’ assertion that the solution manuals sold by defendant qualified as “derivative works” under the Copyright Act. As in Pavlica v. Behr and Addison-Wesley Publ’g Co. v. Brown, defendant’s manuals complemented plaintiffs’ 187 copyrighted textbooks, had no “independent economic value” and were “meaningless’ without the textbooks because they merely provided answers to questions posed in the textbooks." https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/almID/1202435027834/ https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/almID/1202435027834/ (2009) https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4345754/pearson-education-inc-v-henry-nugroho/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4345754/pearson-educati... (the ruling is available here, gratis)
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  IANAL but I believe the case is different for algorithmic solutions. The solutions to a particular textbook are entirely useless outside the context of the textbook, but the solution to "efficiently find a substring within a string" is useful in day-to-day programming. The takedown isn't aimed at the result of "convert 700m to feet", but "describe the process of converting between metres and feet", which is plain ridiculous.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

> This was definitely an unintended consequence. A person driving 100 miles per hour down a residential street and crashing into something is an unintended consequence, but not unforeseen. This may have been "unintended" but when you have a company file DMCA notices on your behalf without proper supervision (especially when they had filed DMCA notices like this against other open source libraries) it is not "unforeseen" for them to file a DMCA notice against a completely innocent project. At the very minimum the open source library that was affected and their maintainers deserve monetary recompense for the time and stress that your actions have cost them.

jeroenhd 4y ago

Are you seriously claiming copyright over other people's solutions? You have *no* right, legally or ethically, to exercise any kind of control over "solutions to company assessments" under the DMCA. At worst, you can try to exercise the controls in the EULA that your victims agreed to, but this sounds like abuse of the legal system.

MarkMarine 4y ago
But it's working. Here is a DCMA the author tried to fight, saying hacker rank doesn't publish their solutions, and the solution is the sole work of the author: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/ea3736a0c4c9574e0c8cea06db41cc4ee01c7e83/2021/11/2021-11-30-hackerrank-counternotice.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/ea3736a0c4c9574e0c8cea06... guess what, it's still offline for DCMA.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  The problem with the DMCA is that if the claimant disagrees with your counter notice, the content stays offline for at least enough time for a lawsuit be be filed over the contents of the post, if the claimant is actually willing to take the matter to court. I don't think anyone will actually go through the expenses to go to court over a code snippet on Github, unless they're particularly principled, wealthy, and retired and I think Hackerrank will definitely try to send their in their legal team. By just filing a counter notice, you're also doxing yourself to people who clearly have no interest in following the law. Github seems to have processed the DMCA counter notice but the content is still offline. From that I gather that Hackerrank filed a lawsuit or the counter notice was retracted somehow, or Github is violating the DMCA by keeping the content offline.
  - josephcsible 4y ago
    Yeah, the fact that the DMCA works like that makes it a guilty-until-proven-innocent system.
    - MarkMarine 4y ago

briandear 4y ago

> is to takedown plagiarized code snippets or solutions to company assessments So which is it? Plagiarized or solutions? Because unless your company actually owns the copyright for the code in question, you have no right to it. If a Google assessment asks “how many manhole covers are there in New York” and someone decides to create a repo with “Manhole covers in New York: 23,000” there is no copyright claim. Do HackerRank users affirmatively sign a non-disclosure agreement? I checked your terms and there is not an apparent non-disclosure agreement. If not, there isn’t any legal recourse if users decide to talk about or solve your problems off the platform. Educational and not for profit use is often protected by Fair Use. I didn’t see the repo in question so I can’t comment on if the use of the material meets the Fair Use criteria. However if people are sharing their answers to your questions in a repo, especially for educational or non-profit value, there isn’t much you can legally do about it. For example, If I take the GMAT and I discuss a question on Twitter, that’s allowed by Fair Use. If I offer to sell a PDF of the entire test, that would not be protected. If someone said “hey HackerRank’s Ruby test asked a question about finding the smallest value in an array” and then they posted a solution. That’s absolutely not violating a HackerRack copyright. People even have the right to describe their experience on HackerRank in great detail. From your own policy: “Content that You own and post on or through HackerRank belongs to You..” So if someone wants to post their solution to a question, your own terms allow that. It’s their solution, it belongs to the user.[1] If someone else “plagiarizes” another user’s solution, HR doesn’t have standing for a DMCA takedown. The user that created the content does, but not HR. However even if HackerRank did own the solutions, there is a high likelihood that Fair Use would be in effect. I have a strong dislike of HackerRank type companies because it’s pretty rare that those ridiculously academic assessments predict real world performance. They are a screening tool for the lazy. A well designed, relevant code test relating to the work of the company or a solid technical interview is much more valuable in my experience. When I was interviewing with companies, I immediately passed on the job of HackerRank was part of the hiring process. I ended up at a FAANG for over 5 years, so it’s pretty clear that anti-HackerRank bias among potential employees like me have a detrimental effect on recruiting. [1] https://www.hackerrank.com/terms-of-service https://www.hackerrank.com/terms-of-service

MarkMarine 4y ago

paranoidrobot 4y ago

> plagiarized code snippets I'm looking at the page that was taken down[1] and it seems to be largely full of pretty basic code snippets demonstrating how to use the Solvers module. Your DMCA request[2] includes the statements that say, in part, that Fair Use has been considered, that you own the copyright, and that the information in that statement is true and accurate. Could you elaborate what on that page you consider to be your copyrighted content, and how you came to hold that copyright? Is it the code snippets, as per your comment? Did your company have an employee write that content? When the DMCA takedown request was being drafted, did someone consider whether those snippets are even qualifies as an Original Work? I'm getting at whether they contain even a minimal level of creativity, as the US Supreme Court has said is a requirement for copyright[3]. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20220114132753/https://docs.sympy.org/latest/modules/solvers/solvers.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220114132753/https://docs.symp... [2] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2022/04/2022-04-15-hackerrank.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2022/04/2022-04-1... [3] https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/ https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
RachelF 4y ago
I wonder how many of the HackerRank questions are themselves plagiarized from other places?
- kristianov 4y ago
  They started by stealing and now these thieves want to claim all code.
- epolanski 4y ago
  Exactly, I have been sent on HackerRank by potential employers twice and every time I was given the usual coding challenge I had already seen on leetcode or similar.

0x0000000 4y ago

> Our intention with this initiative is to takedown plagiarized code snippets or solutions to company assessments. Oooh boy I can't wait to begin publishing solutions to your company's assessments.

oscarbenjamin 4y ago

Thanks Vivek for responding. Speaking as one of the maintainers of SymPy (who received the DCMA takedown request by email) I would like to note some points: 1. If you do a web search for "HackerRank DMCA" you will find similar examples of this that have happened in the past (with exactly the same text). 2. The text of the request is not in any way designed to enable a reasonable response. No detail is given about what the infringing content is so there is no way to comply. 3. It is also clear from this and previous cases that whatever process is used to identify potential targets for DMCA yields false positives and no reasonable judgement seems to be applied in whether or not to issue a takedown request. I also think that GitHub's processes are faulty here: 1. We were given one business day to reply. I replied within 2hrs to say that the request was obviously spam and then sought legal advice. The repo (and website) were shut down before we could get legal advice. One day is nowhere near enough time. The request came in on Thursday night (UK time) and in the UK both Friday and Monday are public holidays this weekend. I don't even know what one "business day" means in this situation. 2. GitHub gives some guidance for how to submit a counter claim but none of the information is applicable to a case like this where so little information is given that is simultaneously impossible to comply with the request and impossible to dispute it. If GitHub makes it this easy to spam DMCA requests then they should also provide some guidance for how to deal with spam requests. I wonder if the FSF or someone else can come up with a good template response to DMCA requests that just don't have enough information in them. If the request doesn't even explain how you could comply then it should be possible to respond to that in a blanket fashion.

rvivek 4y ago
Oscar, thank you for responding and I'm terribly sorry for the disruption this has caused. I should have taken this more seriously when it sprung up on HN the first time but for whatever reason we just fixed that problem and moved on. This is a serious one and we are working on a strategy that is sustainable. Meanwhile, if we need to make a monetary contribution for your effort or anything more we could do to promote, what would be the best way to do it? If you'd like to send me an email to discuss further, I'm available at vivek at hackerrank Thank you & sorry!
- 4y ago

haltingproblem 4y ago

I hate you and your company and will make every effort to not support anyone who uses it in any form whats over. How can you shitbags take down SymPy and then show up on HN to actually make light of it with your crapola comments while it remains taken down.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

certik 4y ago

Dear Vivek, thank you for the note. I am the original author of SymPy. Most people who work on SymPy myself included do it in our free time. So far this has cost many hours of my and many other people's free time to try to figure out what is going on and to get this resolved. I also personally reject your allegations against us. I thought about this situation and how your company could make this right. If you would be willing to help improve the SymPy project, I think it would be very well received. If you are interested, please let us know! See Travis Oliphant's reply, you could for example donate some money to NumFOCUS. We are very good with using money that people or companies donate to fund development and we can really boost SymPy forward big time with a generous donation.

rvivek 4y ago
Yes, absolutely. Apologies for the disruption we caused. We are going to make a donation and here are the changes we are making https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092085

paulproteus 4y ago

I hope you can go beyond root cause analysis and publish some kind of cost-benefit analysis. The risks from misrepresenting your copyright in these cases are not small. Diebold Election Systems paid $125,000 in a similar situation: https://www.eff.org/cases/online-policy-group-v-diebold https://www.eff.org/cases/online-policy-group-v-diebold

_jal 4y ago

Allow me to strongly suggest you stop DCMAing things without a human-with-a-clue in the loop before firing. I get it, I'm an automate-first type of person, too. But it appears your outfit has made a habit of doing this, and you're messing with innocent people for no good reason. Doing that in a `for` loop is irresponsible as hell, and frankly you deserve the bad press you're getting. I highly recommend you reconsider. Legacy media companies do this kind of thing, too. I hope you're more interested in your reputation than they are.

danamit 4y ago

Can companies of guys like this one be penalized for sending automated DMCA requests?

Jupe 4y ago

Wait. Wait a minute. Just wait one little minute here... Your company has issued a DMCA takedown notice for "plagiarized code snippets" against the library-in-questions own documentation? (The take down was issued against docs.sympy.org; linked directly within sympy's GIT repo README.md: https://github.com/sympy/sympy https://github.com/sympy/sympy) And this is an "initiative" your organization has undertaken? Have you thought this through? Where should engineers who want to learn about sympy go to attain that knowledge? Where did your team learn about and generate the assessment questions? Where do you stop with this initiative? Would you issue takedown notices to MDN? Stack Overflow? What about VSCode Copilot?

vmception 4y ago

"Design an automated DMCA takedown algorithm in 40 minutes"

leaflets2 4y ago
For ch: char in solution.text: If webpage.html.indexOf(ch) >= 0 then DMCAReq.send() End End

b20000 4y ago

I hope that all of your snippets and solutions are continued to be spread as coding interviews need to disappear and are the ultimate evil our industry has been dealing with now for several years. Besides, it's not your property anyway, it's the property of those taking the coding interviews.

epolanski 4y ago

> Our intention with this initiative is to takedown plagiarized code snippets or solutions to company assessments. How can this be legal? Plagiarized is moreover a very conveniently vague word. By this very vague definition the overwhelming majority of your own content has been seen on various parts of the internet way before you ever started your business. There can't be a copyright on such a thing and I hope someone fights you in court, this is nothing short of bullying.

skeletal88 4y ago

Will you just stop with the DMCA bs, where you threaten random websites that talk about generic programming? Your company does not own the basic algorithms that are the solutions to the tests on HackerRank.